Today, N-SIDE is an international organization with offices in Belgium and the US. Earlier this year, the company announced a capital increase of 10 million euros to accelerate the development of innovative solutions and encourage the international growth of the company. In the next chapter of this growth story, N-SIDE has started to support the expanding energy market of India.
Indian Energy Exchange (IEX) is the biggest power exchange in India with a market share of 95%. In February of this year, IEX registered year-on-year growth in the volume of 50%. As more Indian citizens need access to electricity and the market is becoming increasingly complex, the trading platform was looking for the best global, modern solution to coordinate the trade in its fast-growing power market.
Building on its existing solution that is based on Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP), N-SIDE has provided a solution that meets the expectations and needs of IEX. The algorithm went live on the IEX platform in April and is now running every day to support 70% electricity trade on such markets.
From Europe to India
One of the reasons why India’s leading energy exchange IEX has turned to N-SIDE for this solution is the company’s experience with the even more complex European energy market. To calculate day-ahead electricity prices across Europe and allocate cross-border transmission capacity on a daily basis, N-SIDE has developed a unique algorithm, Euphemia, that is now being used in 26 countries. The solution excels because of its high performance and robustness and has become a crucial aspect of the EU target to reach a harmonized European electricity market. The successful experience with Europe has convinced IEX that N-SIDE was the right partner to develop an algorithm for the growing Indian market.
“N-SIDE’s Power Matching Algorithm is a powerful market clearing algorithm that optimizes supply and demand matching in a closed-gate auction fashion. As a scalable solution, it is perfect to support the fast market growth in India. It allows the easy implementation of complex bid types”, says Olivier Devolder, Energy Director at N-SIDE.
Competitive electricity prices for citizens
Power exchange can be a very complex matter, but N-SIDE's algorithm always finds the most optimal solution given the available resolution time. The N-SIDE algorithm increases the efficiency of the Indian energy market as it makes it easy to offer complex bid types to suit the changing needs of the market.
S N Goel, Chairman & Managing Director, IEX, “IEX has been at the forefront of energy transformation in India. With technology and customer-centricity being at the core of our efforts to evolve the Indian energy markets, we have always been one step ahead in adopting and integrating world-class solutions in emerging technologies. Our partnership with N-SIDE has been the result of this constant quest for innovation and technology excellence. Through N-SIDE’s globally acclaimed algorithm solution for power markets, we have been able to offer complex bid types to our market participants. This will indeed support Indian industries and the distribution utilities in further optimizing their power procurement costs and in turn, also improve electricity affordability for their end-customers.”
Since the go-live mid-April, N-SIDE’s Power Matching Algorithm has become a successful solution that is being used to discover the price in the Day-Ahead Market. For the duration of the contract signed with IEX, the N-SIDE team is responsible for implementation & operations, license, and support & maintenance. In the coming years, the algorithm will also be constantly improved by the mathematical experts and software engineers at N-SIDE.
N-SIDE remains extremely ambitious to expand its scope even further with power exchanges or other actors in regions outside of Europe and India. “We believe N-SIDE can really help countries around the world to tackle the challenges of their energy market. On top of our acceleration in Europe and India, we are currently looking for new opportunities in Asia and North America”, concludes Olivier Devolder.
Rui Yu